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IT Administrators that are enabling Windows 10 Profile Migration best practices should carefully consider what not to be doing as well as what they should do.

Hovering near the top of the list? Migrating unruly environments. If you’ve found that network policy, account policy, storage policy, and group policies have not been audited and reviewed in a while, then by all means understand the environment and adjust it before you deploy new systems.

Why do we say this? Simple. As network managers ourselves, we have learned a lot over the last two decades about Windows profile migration. We have seen much better systems and network management tools emerge. It’s just a better idea to bring the environment up to health before migrating the endpoints. We make our money on endpoint migration and so it is in our interests to say nothing on the topic. But as network managers and former IT technicians, we know better. There, we said it.

The other thing we’ve seen in our recent travels has been the unreal variety in IT installations. We came across a major corporation that had its users running more than 20,000 different applications on the network. To migrate such an environment is possible in theory, but in practice, the bigger question is: who owns and has the rights to use those apps? Even scarier, have any of those applications been tested and approved to comport with cyber-security best practices?

Our Windows 10 profile migration tool, Tranxition Migration Manager, was built on the premise that migrating failing policies was not a wise practice. And migrating applications of unknown provenance is a recipe for trouble in a legal sense. For example, let’s say that a tool used by an engineer was installed with someone else’s license key.

By moving applications, does the migration of that become a form of permission or acceptance? Risk managers roll through cases of anti-antiperspirant on that score.

Migration manager expects a fresh image of a clean install, with the right policies, versions, and such. It’s much better to let the users download the approved apps from a store, or for IT to remotely install them based upon an inventory at night. That way, software provenance is not a problem.

The other inescapable issue is speed. Getting a persona or Windows profile moved between Windows installations takes time. With Windows 10 profile migration, moving most of the actual profile, applications included, takes way too much time. In fact, we recently saw a large manufacturer calculate that they saved no money while migrating and moving apps over one half a decade. It sounds great. But the devil is certainly in the details.

Migration Manager is considered by IT professionals to give the best return on investment for Windows profile migration. It’s real time detection of applications and OS versions, its slick file migration, and its handling of Outlook and hundreds of other setting constructions, means that users are back to work almost immediately; and technicians don’t have to fuss over the machines to make everything work. You’ll save hours on the bench. We think its usually better to hire migration expert services firms to migrate your environment. They have squeezed all the time out they can. They have the process nailed.

We put a lot of thought into how we built Migration Manager. We did it from the perspective of seasoned IT managers who knew what they were talking about when it comes to Windows 10 profile migration. And most of our customers are seasoned IT managers. We like it that way. When we started out, we wanted to build a tool that helped IT, because we are IT.

A global insurance carrier began testing Migration Manager in 2017. That firm has many offices around the world, each with their own IT teams. The firm used a “free” tool from called USMT and they said they were unhappy with the extra work it created. There were many reported help desk tickets and the IT teams dreaded the approach of a new batch of migrations.

After their initial testing, the team spearheading the evaluation reached out to Tranxition. Professional Services then met with the client and answered questions about implementation, control, security, subtle features, and the types of settings that can be reliably migrated.

Soon, another conference was scheduled with the global team responsible for end point management. Those technical experts asked many questions about implementation, automation, and configuration of the tool, while describing the many headaches they had with the current process.

A decision was taken to purchase and deploy Migration Manager. After a year of use, the customer reports that there have only been three significant incidents where tickets were generated after rollout. Those issues had to do with certain computers having extra long file paths as a result of their partially using Microsoft OneDrive. Tranxition engineering implemented a series of changes to ensure that Migration Manager would handle these extremely long paths.

The customer also requested support for Microsoft Word Building Blocks, a feature that enables the creation of complex documents from text boilerplate as required by insurance firms. Tranxition implemented this on their behalf without charge.

The customer reported: “We love the product. It goes out and finds all the user documents regardless of where they are stored. My users love the fact that they get their personas transferred. We use it for break/fix, laptops, and new devices. I don’t have exact numbers, but one of my guys said it saves him over an hour each time he uses it.”

Instead of a broken process, the firm now has a single, reliable, endpoint deployment process based on Migration Manager that returns the user to work in 1/5th the time required by other solutions. The number of technician hours required for deployment is almost nil, saving up to 2.5 hours per device.

The team lead said: “We recommend Tranxition and its products to other customers. The company has been very responsive.”

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